


be(ware)

by iihappydaysii



Series: Happydays Spooky Week [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2019, Dan POV, Don't sue me, Established Relationship, M/M, Spooky, happy days spooky week, it's been so long i forget how to tag, it's not a whole week, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 05:43:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21221531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iihappydaysii/pseuds/iihappydaysii
Summary: After Phil gets hurt on their US road trip, Dan notices that he’s starting to act really strange.





	be(ware)

**Author's Note:**

> the first installment in my happydays spooky week! these are all just kind of short, fun little things for the lead up to Halloween. should be getting back to the second part of six ravens next month! in the meantime, enjoy some light halloween fun.

Dan had already been up for an hour when Phil finally emerged from their tent into bright Nevada sunlight. Dan thought Phil looked good (as always), yet strange out here in the American desert, all limbs of lanky white skin, like a very tall, very lost snowman.

For the last several days, they’d been enjoying their post-VidCon road trip as best they could, though it _was_ taking their pale, reclusive asses out of their comfort zones. After that video in June, Dan guessed this was the summer of leaving behind comfort zones for great unknowns.

Phil turned to Dan and asked, “Do we have any plasters?”

“We should,” Dan replied, as he leaned over to tie his left shoe. “Check the front of my bag.”

“Thanks,” Phil said, reaching back into the tent to drag out Dan’s backpack.

“What’d you need a plaster for?”

Phil replied without looking at Dan, focused on rummaging through the pack. “Just woke up with this cut on my leg.”

Shoe tied, Dan stood from the red rock he’d been sitting on and walked across a worn-down patch of sandy earth to Phil.“Let me look.” He knelt down and saw a swollen red gouge across Phil’s calf. He gently touched the skin around it and gurgled out blood. “Shit, babe. What the hell happened?”

“I have no idea.”

“Only you could manage to get this hurt in your sleep.”

Dan took over for Phil, pulling a sterile wipe, a large plaster and some triple antibiotic ointment out of a small first-aid case he’d packed. He felt a surge of pride that he’d thought to bring these things as he cleaned and patched up Phil’s cut.

Just as he was pressing the plaster into place, Cornelia and Martyn emerged from their tent and asked about breakfast. With that, the cut was all but forgotten.

It wasn’t until Dan and Phil had finished their holiday and returned home that Dan had begun to notice something was very wrong with Phil. When he’d offered Phil a bowl of cereal for breakfast, he’d gruffly responded with, “Don’t we have any real food.”

“Real food?” Dan had asked. Phil loved cereal. This was a man who normally hoarded cereal away like a squirrel collecting nuts for winter. Dan had even found half-eaten boxes in the bathroom cabinet before.

“Don’t we have bacon?”

They never had bacon. “No…” Dan replied, a feeling of unease settling over him. “We can probably order some in though.”

Phil grumbled “thanks”, then shuffled out of the kitchen.

The bacon incident was only the first in a series of incidents that left Dan with an impending sense of dread he couldn’t seem to shake. Phil had stopped showering unless he was prompted and pushed by Dan. He’d stopped shaving too, giving his face a dark shadow of stubble. Dan was also concerned that Phil would eat them out of house and home. Dan had once returned from a jog to find Phil sat on the sofa eating deli meat from a tub with his bare hands. Phil would leave his clothes all over the floor, he’d constantly mumble under his breath, his voice often gruff like he’d been shouting. Dan had, on more than one occasion, found Phil wandering the flat in the middle of the night, with all the lights turned off.

And then there was the sex… Dan wasn’t really complaining about that one, but it was different. It was all rough hands and Phil’s teeth nipping at his skin. It was being bent over things and just… taken. God, it was hot, but it wasn’t like it had been even just a few months ago. It… sex… it had become _wild_.

Eventually, it was too much for Dan to deal with on his own. He had to talk to someone about it (not about the sex, but the rest of it).

Dan met Cornelia at Starbucks, and she suggested they take their drinks with them and walk. Dan was glad for the suggestion as he needed some way to work off the nervous energy he’d built up from dealing with all of Phil’s newfound strangeness. They talked about work and other things, but eventually the conversation rolled around to Phil.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Phil recently?” Dan asked, his voice low, as if he needed to keep this secret.

“Strange…? I’m not sure. You know him best, though he has seemed a bit… gruff lately, I guess.”

“Gruff?” For Dan, it felt like an understatement, but Cornelia also wasn’t living with Phil.

“Yes, gruff. Like he’s stressed.”

Dan considered that for a moment. Maybe Phil _was_ stressed, Maybe he wasn’t handlingall the changes as well as he’d expected to. Maybe he was just worried about all the plans they had for the future.

“That’s probably it,” Dan said, mostly because he wanted that to be it. But when Dan got home that day, Phil wasn’t there and the brief moment of calm he’d felt talking to Cornelia washed away instantly.

He texted Phil and he didn’t reply, and he didn’t answer when Dan called either.

Dan waited around the flat for a while, alternating between stress pacing and trying to distract himself. He texted Martyn and few of their friends to see if anyone had heard from Phil, but no one had. After dark, Dan couldn’t take it anymore. In nearly ten years together, Phil had never done anything like this. Going off the grid was Dan’s thing.

That was when Dan had an idea. Phil lost his phone all the fucking time so Dan had an app on his that would help Phil locate his phone even when it was on silent. Dan opened the app and searched for Phil’s phone.

It appeared nearly ten miles away, down the alleyway of streets he didn’t recognize, in a neighborhood he didn’t know. Unsure whether to be scared or frustrated or pissed, Dan grabbed his coat and left the flat so he could take a cab to wherever the hell Phil was and just get this all sorted once and for all.

He gave the crossroads to the cab driver and nervously bit at his thumbnail all the way there. To distract himself, Dan focused on the full moon shimmering in through the window. When they arrived, Dan paid the driver and followed his app down the narrow alley, using the light on his phone to guide the way.

As Dan slowly splashed through a trail of rain water, he breathed in a wet and musty stench, with an undercurrent of something rotten. The brick buildings cast cold shadows over him in every direction. Goosepimples crept across his skin.

Dan stopped where his phone told him to, but Phil wasn’t here.

“Goddammit,” Dan grumbled. _All this for a dead end? _he thought, but before he could add on to that thought, he noticed an unusual glint in one of the bricks in the path. Dan turned his phone light towards it and his stomach sank. It was a cell phone.

Dan bent down to pick it up. It was Phil’s phone.

A splash of water made Dan jump. He looked away from the phone and ahead of him.

There he was—Phil—standing in the glow of the full moon, every inch of his body exposed to that light.

Dan wanted to call out to Phil, to ask why the hell he was standing naked in this alley, but his words were cut off by a rough, broken cry unlike anything he’d heard before.

Phil had his head thrown back, then one of his shoulders snapped forward while the other snapped back. It was a horrible sound, like when Adrian had jumped off the swings and broken his arm. But it happened again and again, the contortions moving through Phil’s body like a wave. Phil fell forward, his hands hitting flat against the bricks.

What happened next happened too quickly for Dan to understand it as individual pieces. It was emerging claws, a rush of midnight black hair sweeping away any sign of skin. It was the face Dan had come to know so well, to love and to memorize, crushing in, breaking up and away and reforming, transforming, until nothing was left of the man he loved but his eyes, as bright and crystal blue as ever.

Where before a man had been standing was now a wolf, larger than anything he’d seen in a zoo, but still unmistakably a wolf. The wolf looked over at Dan for the first time during all of this, and Dan’s heart caught in his chest. Could Phil recognize him? If not, was Dan in danger? Dan braced himself for an attack, but the wolf—Phil—just turned his head towards the full moon and howled.


End file.
